from the lectern. Noyes had by then served for four years as a trustee of the school, which despite his objection moved a decade later to New Haven and became Yale College.
Connecticut’s General Assembly had chartered the Collegiate School in 1701 to instruct the colony’s youth in the arts and sciences and fit them “for public employment both in church and civil state.” The group of founding ministers, which included Rev. James Noyes, requested prior advice from several Boston colleagues. Rev. Cotton Mather responded with a detailed “Scheme for the College,” and Judge Samuel Sewall promised a later “essay.” He sent instead “a sheet to discourage our trading to Africa for men,” a three-page pamphlet published in Boston the previous year. Viewed today as America’s first antislavery tract, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial expressed Sewall’s opposition to the African slave trade and the practice of slavery in the American colonies. Whether the “sheet” influenced the thoughts of Connecticut ministers preparing to educate the colony’s future leaders is not known.
After Connecticut’s General Court passed “An Act for the Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School” in 1701, Nathaniel Lynde deeded a building and two acres in Saybrook “for the liberal education of youth that by God’s blessing may be fit for public service.”
When Rev. Moses Noyes preached to students at the college six years after its founding, his topic was childbearing. Offering a literal interpretation of a passage in Genesis describing Abraham as a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born, he advised the young scholars in Saybrook that both men and women could conceive children at an advanced age. Addressing them as “my brethren, my dear brethren,” he also explained that while men could “beget” sons, they could not themselves bear children, for “they have not the proper organs for the business.” He then recommended that the future ministers and government officials “marry wives younger than themselves” since men could conceive over a longer span of years than women.
Newly elected as a trustee of the Collegiate School in 1703, Moses Noyes signed the diploma of John Hart, age twenty-one, who graduated alone that year at Saybrook.
Demographic data are scarce for early Connecticut towns, where marriage age varied widely, but Moses Noyes’s guidance reflected his own experience. Like his brother James, he had married at about age thirty-four and had chosen a wife ten years younger. Both Matthew Griswold and Richard Ely, a generation older than Lyme’s minister, married at around age thirty-six and also chose younger wives, but some of Noyes’s contemporaries married earlier. Joseph Peck (1640–1718), two years older than Moses Noyes and a church deacon, was about twenty-one when he married Sarah Parker (1636–1726), some five years his senior.
With an apology that he may have “tired the patience” of the Collegiate School students, Noyes, then sixty-three and a grandfather, concluded his sermon with words of reassurance. “Men and women too may have no reason of discouragement,” he advised, “for they may have children when they are exceeding old.” He ended his lecture with a warning about “the necessity of having midwives” and an additional reminder about the importance of good midwives. Deaths in childbirth were common, and while his own four children had lived to adulthood, the seventh and last child of his brother James, named Moses, died in 1692 at age five weeks.
When Noyes delivered his remarks on childbearing in 1707, the eldest son of his sister Sarah Hale served as senior tutor at the Collegiate School and wrote down “in short hand” the words of his uncle’s sermon. James Hale (1685–1742) had graduated from Harvard in 1703, a year after the publication of his father’s treatise on witchcraft, and served for two years as a tutor in Saybrook. He settled in 1718 as the founding minister in Ashford, Connecticut, and several of his family members later moved to Vermont, where Rev. Moses Noyes’s curious sermon on childbearing appeared in print in 1785.
CHAPTER SIX
Lessons from a Wayward Son
An elaborate narrative about the remarkable adventures of the Griswold family’s disobedient son provided Boston minister Cotton Mather with material for a sermon.
In this time two Godly ministers came to see my family and one of them, then putting up a fervent prayer with us on the behalf of my absent child, he was directed into such expressions that I was persuaded that the prayer was not lost, and that my poor son was then in some remarkable distress.
Sometimes Moses Noyes’s voice can be heard indirectly. A letter that Matthew Griswold Jr. (1652–1716) composed in 1712 after the death of his eldest son conveys the guidance of Lyme’s minister. Echoing the biblical parable of the prodigal son, the lengthy narrative relates the “remarkable circumstances” of a wayward youth who strays and suffers before reuniting with his father. Mr. Griswold sent the sermon-like story to Rev. Cotton Mather in Boston.
The letter’s context leaves little doubt that the “two Godly ministers” who prayed with the Griswold family at its time of affliction were Moses Noyes and Azariah Mather (1685–1736), age twenty-seven at the time and Cotton Mather’s cousin. Ordained in Saybrook in 1710, he had succeeded James Hale as tutor at the Collegiate School, and Cotton Mather had noted in his diary, “I have a Kinsman who is Minister of Saybrook, and who has also an Opportunity to do good unto the College there.” While Matthew Griswold Jr. had no personal acquaintance with Cotton Mather, Azariah Mather had recently received several notes of encouragement from his influential relative, along with a request for assistance “in dispersing books of Piety thro’ the Colony.”
“Sir,” Mr. Griswold wrote, “Though I am an utter stranger to you, yet, considering that it ought to be the chief and continual care of every man to glorify God, I thought it my duty humbly to present unto you the following narrative, desiring you to improve it as God shall direct.” The letter began with an account of his eldest son Matthew Griswold 3rd (1689–1712), age seventeen and described as “weakly” since childhood, disobeying his father and “escaping” from his house to go to sea. How he reached the West Indies, presumably on a coastal trading vessel, is not explained, but the narrative of loss and redemption provides extended detail about the missing son’s spiritual tests. After barely surviving a severe storm at sea, the young Griswold acknowledged his dependence on providential mercy, but harsher lessons followed.
London portrait artist Peter Pelham launched his reputation as an American engraver by reproducing his own painting of Cotton Mather, just months before the Boston minister’s death at age sixty-five in 1728.
The sandy point where Matthew Griswold 3rd allegedly returned after a harrowing five years at sea appears as a sun-drenched site for summer bathing two centuries later in William Chadwick’s Bathers at Griswold Beach. “Moonlight drives to Griswold’s beach are in order this week,” reported Old Lyme’s hometown newspaper the Sound Breeze in August 1893.
Impressed aboard a man of war in Jamaica, he obtained release after punishing months of service, only to fall in “with a privateer, on board whereof he was exposed unto eminent hazard of his life, in an hot
